Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162): The Sacred Fount / The Wings of the Dove

This fifth volume in the Library of America edition of the complete novels of Henry James brings together one of his most unusual works with one of his most beloved masterpieces. James characterized The Sacred Fount, the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as a fine flight into the high fantastic. Its nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may tap into the sacred fount of another person, and pursues his insight with a perplexing and ambiguous persistence. A tragic tale of innocence and experience that has long been acclaimed as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist, The Wings of the Dove depicts the entanglement of the fatally ill Milly Theale, a wealthy young American heiress, with the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the worldly journalist Morton Densher, in an intricate and ultimately devastating scheme of love and betrayal.